BRAND FEVER & BABYLON BOOTSTRAPS
This
warped iPod sketch (5.5MB quicktime movie) feels entirely like Jam-era Chris Morris (detached
voices, skewed video effects, queasy dark comedy, ambient music bed) but
was made by these guys.
Soft-brain humor for a lazy weekend. AKA everything
else i´ve looked at on the internet recently is hugely depressing.
Like-- Chant down Babylon, right? Nope.
In addition to atrocious bungling & greedy bids, my country is
actively trampling millenia of history-- the entire scale of violence
shifts. Wayne hosts an amazing pic of Neo Babylon strolling Nebuchadnezzar Bablyon. Where is Bob Marley / Indiana Jones / the U.N. when you need him?
Also: ads hack consciousness. and conscientiousness. & vice versa. Media conflict looks like this. (2.5MB quicktime movie)
MUGSHOT
Risky Roadz, the most ambitious of the handful of self-produced grime/garage scene DVDs I've seen, is a cluttered, bugged-out forest. You can literally get lost in it, with submenus navigating 3+ hours of handheld digicam footage, a majority of it featuring poor young black guys shouting urban poetry and/or warrior chants into overloaded microphones with or without musical accompaniment. POW! If you call that music.
Kano shows in a WHITE BATHROBE to drop laid-back (chilled-out, utterly non David Brentian) mic management tips, accapella, then takes a sip from his white coffee mug. You can't see his feet but I bet the brother's rocking terrycloth slippers.
GUNSHOT RIDDIM
While typing a longish piece on the odd intersection btwn M.I.A.´s neatly tailored package and the unruly tangle that is the Risky Roadz DVD, I look up and Simon Silverdollar has posted one of my fav grime riddims, a perfect alien bruiser known as Pulse Eskimo aka the Gunshot Riddim. (Downloadable as a m4a file, whatever that is..). A crucial listen, Gunshot humps and clatters with a movement all its own. Simon sez: "despite being built from uniformly ultra-brutalist sounds and textures, it never lapses into the repellent macho rigidity of much extreme electronic music. this is a more organic take on extremism, on a human, even personal, scale. the sound of people losing and terrifying themselves, rather than machines terrorising people." Yup.I feel like I´m outsourcing my work, so, biggish post soon, complete w/ a pic of Kano slaying sucker MCs in a bathrobe, coffee mug in hand. I meant to post old (read: pre-Diwali) Lenky riddims, but I can´t remember if they were destroyed in last years car crash or not.
LANDMARK MURK IN THE HISTORY OF LIBERTY
at least we´re not alone.
bbc world service interviewed 22,000 people in 21 countries about international peace & security under the bush admin.
WHO BUYS MUSIC MAGAZINES, STILL?
grime lovers / detractors take note: simon platinum plus on a track-by-track writeup of 2004 postrave british eskimo thug music.On the delicious epic draw-jopper that is Jammer´s 'Feedback' : "Jammer merks sunn-o and all those people, with a meditation on bass feedback and thrum. sludgy, but in a really pure, almost blissy way, it's right out there with wonder's 'what', and may be even beyond, at that end of the grime spectrum that takes delight in making no sense and confusing everyone. in theory that's great, and in practice it's lots of fun too." Yes.
I´ve never heard anything hang in the air & electrify it the way 'Feedback' does; I respect the frequencies too much to cramp them onto an MP3 or I´d rip it. Thrilling inexplicable sound pressured onto vinyl.
Even (especially?) if you nobody hears these tunes, people should read the writeups & try to make music that sounds the way Simon describes it. Sad, in a way, but true: printed music magazines are like dinosaurs with arthritis.
5KILLS 2 PAY TH3 B1LLS
My greatest achievement yesterday was
rearranging the preschool letter-magnets on a friend's refrigerator to spell:
FUCK UP GANSTER COPZ FOMENT CLASS WAR
I used all available vowels.